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Saturday, 22 October 2016

The second step in the inspection involves using an angle beam transducer to inspect the actual weld. Angle beam transducers use the principal of refraction and mode conversion to produce refrected shear or longitudinal waves in the test material. This inspection may include the root,sidewall, Crown, and heat- affected zones of a weld.
The process involves scanning the surface of the material around the weldment with the transducer. This refracted sound wave will bounce off a reflector ( discontinuity) in the path of the sound beam. Will proper angle beam techniques, echoes returned from the weld zone may allow the operator to determine the location and type of discontinuity.
To determine the proper scanning area for the welder,the inspector must first calculator the location of the sound beam in the test material. Using the refracted angle, beam index point and material thickness, the V-path and skip distance of the sound beam is found. Once they have been calculated, the inspector can identify the transducer locations on the surface of the material corresponding to the Crown, side wall,and root of the weld.

The most commonly occurring defects in welded joints are porosity, Slag inclusions, lack of side - wall fusion, lack of inter - run fusion, lack of root penetration, undercutting, and longitudinal or transverse cracks.
With the exception of signal gas pores all the defects listed are usually well detectable by ultrasonic. Most applications are on low-alloy construction quality steels,however, world's in aluminium can also be tested. Ultrasonic flaw detection has long been the preferred method for nondestructive testing in welding application. This safe,accurate, and simple technique has pushed ultrasonics to the forefront of inspection technology.
Ultrasonic weld inspections are typically performed using a straight beam transducer in conjunction with an angle beam transducer and wedge. A straight beam transducer, producing a longitudinal wave at normal incident into the test piece, is first used to locate any laminations in important because an angle beam transducer may not able to provide a return signal from a lamina flaw.

Rail inspections were initially performed solely means. Ofcourse, visual inspections will only detect external defects and sometimes the subtle signs of large internal problems. The need for a better inspection Methley became a high priority because of aderailment at Manchester, NY in 1911, in which 29 people were killed and 60 were seriously injured. In the U.S bureau of safety's ( now the national transportation safety board) investigation of the accident, a broken rail was determined to be the cause of the derailment. The bureau established that the rail failure was caused by defect that entirely internal and probably could not have been detected by visual means. The defect was called a transverse fissure ( example shown on the left). The railroads began investigating the prevalence of this defect and found transverse fissures were widespread.
One of the methods used to inspect rail is ultrasonic inspection. Both normal - and angle - beam techniques are used, as are both pulse - echo and pitch - catch techniques transducer arrangements offer different inspection capabilities. Manual contact testing is done to evaluate small section of rail but the ultrasonic inspection has been automated to allow inspection of large amounts of rail.
Fluid filed wheels or sleds are often used to couple the transducer to the rail. Sperry Rail services, which is one of the companies that perform rail inspection, uses Roller search units ( RSUs) comprising a combination of different transducer angles to achieve the best inspection possible. A schematic of an RSU is shown below.